Seriously, though.  I love Colbert, but I thought this bit was kind of amusing and indicative of a general attitude.

He started out making a joke about a seder for dogs.  And if there are jewish dogs, then soon there will be christian dogs, and then, 700 years later, there will be muslim dogs.  Of course, thats just 100 years to us.

What I find amusing here is that its the 700 years that gets noted.  However, Judaism started, what, 3500 or 4000 years before Christianity.  I think that most people imagine that the two started around the same time, or within a couple centuries.  But it ain’t so, Joe.

Obviously, nothing was meant by this on Colbert’s end, but, y’know, I think its worth noting.

So, to all you zombie worshippers out there, you are still just new kids.

Pope to Muslims: Religion rejects violence – Africa – msnbc.com

“Genuine religion … stands at the base of any authentically human culture,” he said. “It rejects all forms of violence and totalitarianism: not only on principles of faith but also of right reason.”

(unless its the One True Catholic Church, in which case, CRUSADE ON, BROTHER!)

The pope said that “religion and reason mutually reinforce one another”

(unless religion says sperm is sacred and anyone having sex for pleasure is a dirty whore, and reason calls for the use of condoms to save lives…then faith trumps reason, hands down)

Pope=Death

Boy,l we sure did make things better than under the Taliban…

The pocket-size translation of the Quran has already landed six men in prison in Afghanistan and left two of them begging judges to spare their lives. They’re accused of modifying the Quran and their fate could be decided Sunday in court

Sadly, in much of the middle east, serving a little time is the best possible outcome.  She’s lucky she wasn’t stoned to death.  Probably because she’s from the UK, and doesn’t have a family who would rather slaughter their daughter than put up with her evil ways.

Dubai jails UK woman for adultery – CNN.com

A British mother-of-two looks set to serve a three-month jail sentence for adultery after losing her appeal against the conviction in Dubai.

But an appeal court halved the six-month term initially imposed last November, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office confirmed.

Lets summarize first.

1. Rick Warren is anti-gay.
   

   Dr Warren said that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. “We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Dr Warren said.

2. Rick Warren is anti-woman (see #32) I don’t see how you can tell a woman to let a man beat her instead of getting a divorce and be anything but anti-woman
3. Rick Warren is anti-AIDS prevention.  His ‘main man’ in Uganda is named Ssempa:
   

   Ssempa’s stunts have included burning condoms in the name of Jesus and arranging the publication of names of homosexuals in cooperative local newspapers while lobbying for criminal penalties to imprison them.

And this man isn’t run out of town on a rail?  Why?  Because of the most insidious aspect of religion.

It justifies anything and everything.  Once in a blue moon, as in the case of Madeline Kara Neumann, there will be a cry for people to be held accountable for their religions beliefs and the actions that stem from them, but as a rule, anything goes.  If I said the things Rick Warren said, and my only justification was “because”, I’d been called a monster.

This is the twisted result of backwards tolerance.

You see it in some Middle East and African countries where women are treated like property ON A GOOD DAY.  We say to ourselves “Well, thats just their way”.  We can’t question their religion because then, y’know, you might have to apply that to religion here too.  Further, most people don’t fully understand that this isn’t ‘their’ way, its forced upon the women.  The idea that there is ABSOLUTELY NO CHOICE doesn’t fully compute to us, and so we make the assumption that the women want to be treated worse than dogs and that religion can justify this anyhow.

Any other name put on this would make these people devils.

Wow, I didn’t realize how horribly dangerous we were.

Now, while I think that Rob Sherman (if he’s who I think he is) is using his child, I agree with his cause.

I also think that anyone who finds their faith threatened by someone believing something else, or by someone rejecting that faith, then they really don’t have a very strong faith at all.

Interesting…Islam likes to say pretty much the same thing about people who don’t believe in Allah, or worse, those who leave Islam.  Leaving Islam, apparently, damages all muslims.

What is it about ‘people of faith’ that scares them so about people who don’t buy what they bought?

Oh, right…fantasies are pretty damn hard to maintain when someone keeps saying that its all make-believe.

This is actually unfortunate. Forget the fact that a number of people might just go nuts (I’m thinking thats a small number…they probably already went nuts when he married a catholic in the first place). Now this man’s opinions on Islamic extremism will carry zero weight with, well, Muslims.
Imagine the reverse. Like, maybe that Archbishop converting to Islam…

lgf: Pope Baptizes Muslim, Seething Expected

VATICAN CITY (AP) – Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book “Long Live Israel.”

Let’s see, first its Hagee who thinks that we should be working to bring about the apocalypse so Jesus will come back, and who thinks the holocaust and other attempts to wipe out the jews are due to the jews themselves, and says equally disgusting things about gays and Catholics.
Now, John-boy has picked up Rod Parsley.
Parsley believes that the US was founded to destroy islam, AND that people should be prosecuted for committing adultery, as well as other crazy stuff.
John, truly, any maverick-ness you might have had has gone the way of Britney’s image, into the toilet.
You sell your soul, and the irony is not lost.

McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam

And today’s installment of ‘Pot, meet kettle’:

Cleric attacks hardliners over wedding dance | Oddly Enough | Reuters
       A prominent Saudi Arabian cleric has issued a rare public attack on
religious hardliners angry over a video showing           him dancing at a
wedding in the conservative Islamic state, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
       …
      Obaikan, an adviser to the cleric-run Ministry of Justice, defended himself in remarks published in Asharq al-Awsat,           saying the society needed to “get over restrictions imposed by ignorant people.”

Honestly.  When the government executes you for being gay, isn’t that almost the definition of systematic oppression?
‘Discrete’…the same way light skinned black people could pass if they were discrete.  The same way apostates can get along fine if they are ‘discrete’.
The UK and most, if not all, of Europe is suffering from a deep and profound fear of Islam.
The Archbishop of Canterbury went so far as to suggest that Muslims be allowed to have their own set of laws.  England would have two legal systems.  At what point do you just give up the illusion of being one country?  The brilliance of the modern legal and governmental system is that there is only one set of laws, that they apply to everyone equally (in theory, if not in practice).  It doesn’t matter if the second system is sharia, or rabbinical, or just some new set of laws dreamed up in a poli-sci class.  When your country does not treat all people under the same laws, death comes in robes of righteousness.

Gay teenager is facing gallows as his asylum bid is rejected – Times Online

The ruling will put the Home Office under renewed pressure to reassess his case — or face the possibility of sending a young man to his death. The department’s own guidance concedes that Iran executes homosexuals but rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians.
..
“The Home Office’s position is that gay people can return to Iran safely
providing they are ‘discreet’. Heaven knows what that means,” he said.